Wednesday, September 2, 2009

In a previous post I showed the horrors of my prior UI. And...it was bad. Okay, it wasn't as bad as it could've been, but it was pretty atrocious. Thanks to a lot of tips and some great examples of things, I bring you the new hotness.

Before:

And after:

The buttons have been made a bit smaller, prettified with buttonfacade, and reduced to a total of four sets of bartender buttons. The bag and menu buttons have been hidden and only show up not in combat and when mouseovered, at the top of the screen. Omen, recount, and the chat window are all in the bottom viewport area, as is a square map (courtesy of squeenix). All map buttons have been removed, and are either part of FuBar (at the top) or have keyboard shortcuts to access (like the map). Decursive sits to the far left, as does ora2 normally. The HUD has been removed, and instead pitbull is used for player, target and target/target data. This is combined with the display parts of feralbynight to show cooldowns, combo points, lacerate stacks, mangle time and other bleeds. SCT displays minimal information and filters incoming heals out, displaying only damage intake (which is mostly to give me an idea of what the flow of combat is looking like on an intuitive level). TimeToDie is there to also give better information on how long I have (it's been moved slightly since this pic, but you can see it on top of the targettarget frame.

My buffs are provided by satrina buff frames, and are at the top of the screen going along the top, fairly small (I don't tend to look at them often) and skinned via buttonfacade. My debuffs (not shown) are below my character, also done via SBF. Target buffs and debuffs are done via pitbull. Target-target only has debuffs; this is primarily to allow for easy tank switching on things like Gormok and # of impales.

After doing this I changed a couple more things, so that errors I don't care about (particularly rage/energy ones) are no longer displayed, buffs gained are displayed not as big messages, and the tooltip is moved to be a bit less annoyingly placed.

Things I still don't like are the size of the raid frame space; when I'm not in a raid, this takes up a lot of room that looks kind of ugly. I'll be playing with this in the future, likely removing all of xperl completely. The floating combat damage is a bit large too, and I think I'll tone that down a skosh. I may also remove recount now that I have time to die, or at least move it somewhere that isn't dedicated. It's not that useful a tool for using during combat. Decursive is also another annoying addon that I don't like the position of. With grid and clique, I suspect I can remove it completely, but that takes time. Still it's eons better than what I had before and is very good for giving me exactly the information I need quickly and in the center of the screen while minimizing the amount of space that's taken up.

6 comments:

the mod I use is a very outdated one called CT_Viewport. It still works and hasn't failed in years though. There are others that do exactly the same thing, and allow you to change the screen resolution however you want. I really like it for tanking; having almost zero screen real estate taken up by buttons and the like means that I have a lot more visibility and can easily see things behind me and underneath me.

I tried an addon called RogueSpamReborn, but it did nothing for me. So I went with pError instead. It's simple and all you do is add the text of the message you don't want to see, and you'll not see it again. Works great.

Hey Kalon,Thank you very much! Gonna stop being bugged by errors :)After reading your article, I try to remove my HUD, but I can't! It's too much usefull for me! It permited me to avoid the circle on Sartharion 3D or KT! And now I'm just stuck with it! You should try ForteX it's so usefull to track cooldown!I was reconsidering using FBN to track dot and savage roar, but Quartz do it perfectly and is really clean so I don't swap. I even remove quite entirely class timer to use it!

If you want a viewport uptodate, try Sunn - Viewport Art. It does the same than CT_viewport, with a small part of skining.

ThinkTank bio

About Me

Kalon likes playing tanks, no matter how hard he tries to fight it. He is not as hardcore as many but spends a lot of time thinking about WoW, and randomly rants about it now and then. He played formerly on the Argent Dawn (EU) server and was a founding member of Fire and Blood (Quel'Dorei) before joining Casually Serious, a guild devoted to hard core progression on only 8 hours of raiding time a week.
He is a devoted husband, father, and when he has the time programs software.